Ultra-Fresh Fashion: Creating Demand with Freshness and Agility

Using agile supply chains, fast fashion companies have been viewed as best practice examples in industries. Prior research focuses on how agility can equip such companies with strong sense-and-respond capabilities to identify and fulfill unpredictable customer demands. There is another powerful dimension of agility—the ability to create new products frequently—that has enabled recent market success of companies such as Shein and Temu, labeled by some industry press as ultra-fast fashion. These companies, relying on end-to-end digital technologies, have pushed this dimension of agility to unprecedentedly high levels, launching new products with great frequency and variety. The frequent product launches create freshness, stimulating latent demands of consumers and making these companies “ultra-fresh” fashion, a term we adopt in this paper. We seek to model this dimension of agility as an operational strategy for demand creation. Our model enables us to explore the effects through the lens of profit to the firm, consumer surplus, and environmental impact. Our analysis reveals that frequent product launches, high variety, and low prices—the three salient features of ultra-fresh fashion—are driven by both the product design agility and the customers’ interest for product freshness. The ultra-fresh strategy allows steady profit increase for the firm and benefits consumers in aggregate but may cause negative environmental impact if left unchecked. This paper was accepted by Jay Swaminathan, operations management. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06249 .